“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Putting Down the Pen: How School Teaches Us the Worst Possible Way to Read Literature

Storytelling comes naturally
to humans. But there is a special category of narratives that we’re taught from
an early age to approach in the most strained and unnatural of ways. The label
we apply to this category is literature. While we demand of movies and
television shows that they envelop us in the seamlessly imagined worlds of
their creators’ visions, not only whisking us away from our own concerns, but
rendering us oblivious as well, however fleetingly, to the artificiality of the
dramas playing out before us, we split the spines of literary works expecting
some real effort at heightened awareness to be demanded of us—which is why many
of us seldom read this type of fiction at all.

Some of the difficulty is
intrinsic to the literary endeavor, reflecting the authors’ intention to engage
our intellect as well as our emotions. But many academics seem to believe that
literature exists for the sole purpose of supporting a superstructure of
scholarly discourse. Rather than treating it as an art form occupying a region
where intuitive aesthetic experience overlaps with cerebral philosophical
musing, these scholars take it as their duty to impress upon us the importance
of approaching literature as a purely intellectual exercise. In other words, if
you allow yourself to become absorbed in the story, especially to the point
where you forget, however briefly, that it is just a story, then you’re breaking
faith with the very institutions that support literary scholarship—and that to
some degree support literature as an art form.

The unremarked scandal of
modern literary scholarship is that the tension between reading as an aesthetic
experience and reading as a purely intellectual pursuit is never even acknowledged.
Many students seeking a deeper and more indelible involvement with great works
come away instead with instructions on how to take on a mindset and apply a set
of methods designed specifically to preclude just the type of experience
they’re hoping to achieve. For instance, when novelist and translator Tim Parks
wrote an essay called “A
Weapon for Readers” for The New York
Review of Books, in which he opined on the critical importance of having a
pen in hand while reading, he received several emails from disappointed readers
who “even thus armed felt the text was passing them by.” In a response titled “How I Read,”
Parks begins with an assurance that he will resist being “prescriptive” as he
shares his own reading methods, and yet he goes on to profess, “I do believe
reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive
absorption.” But, we might ask, could there also be such a state as active absorption? And isn’t that what
most of us are hoping for when we read a story?

Tim Parks

For Parks, and nearly
every academic literary scholar writing or teaching today, stories are vehicles
for the transmission of culture and hence reducible to the propositional information
contained within them. The task of the scholar and the responsible reader alike
therefore is to penetrate the surface effects of the story—the characters, the
drama, the music of the prose—so we can scrutinize the underlying assumptions that
hold them all together and make them come to life. As author David Shields
explains in his widely celebrated manifesto Reality
Hunger, “I always read the book as an allegory, as a disguised
philosophical argument.” Parks demonstrates more precisely what this style of
reading entails, writing, “As I dive into the opening pages, the first question
I’m asking is, what are the qualities or values that matter most to this author,
or at least in this novel?” Instead of pausing to focus on character
descriptions or to take any special note of the setting, he aims his pen at
clues to the author’s unspoken preoccupations:

I
start a novel by Hemingway and at once I find people taking risks, forcing
themselves toward acts of courage, acts of independence, in a world described
as dangerous and indifferent to human destiny. I wonder if being courageous is
considered more important than being just or good, more important than coming
out a winner, more important than comradeship. Is it the dominant value? I’m on
the lookout for how each character positions himself in relation to courage.

We can forget for a moment that Parks’ claim is
impossible—how could he start a novel
with so much foreknowledge of what it contains? The important point revealed in
this description is that from the opening pages Parks is searching for ways to
leap from the particular to the abstract, from specific incidents of the plot
to general propositions about the world and the people in it. He goes on,

After
that the next step is to wonder what is the connection between these force
fields—fear/courage, belonging/exclusion, domination/submission—and the style
of the book, the way the plot unfolds. How is the writer trying to draw me into
the mental world of his characters through his writing, through his
conversation with me?

While this process of putting the characters in some relation
to each other and the author in relation to the reader is going on, another
crucial question is hammering away in my head. Is this a convincing vision of
the world?

Like Shields, Parks is reducing stories to
philosophical arguments. And he proceeds to weigh them according to how well
they mesh with his own beliefs.

Parks addresses the objection
that his brand of critical reading, which he refers to as “alert resistance,” will
make us much less likely to experience “those wonderful moments when we might
fall under a writer’s spell” by insisting that there will be time enough for
that after we’ve thoroughly examined the text for dangerous hidden assumptions,
and by further suggesting that many writers will have worked hard enough on
their texts to survive our scrutiny. For Parks and other postmodern scholars,
there’s simply too much at stake for us to allow ourselves to be taken in by a
good story until it’s been properly scanned for contraband ideas. “Sometimes it
seems the whole of society languishes in the stupor of the fictions it has
swallowed,” he writes. Because it’s a central tenet of postmodernism, the
ascendant philosophy in English departments across the country, Parks fails to appreciate
just how extraordinary a claim he’s making when he suggests that writers of
literary texts are responsible, at least to some degree, for all the worst ills
of society.

David Shields

The sickening irony is
that postmodern scholars are guilty of the very crime they accuse literary authors
of committing. Critics like Parks and Shields charge that writers dazzle us
with stories so they can secretly inculcate us with their ideologies. Parks
feels he needs to teach readers “to protect themselves from all those
underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of
it.” And yet when his own readers come to him looking for advice on how to
experience literature more deeply he offers them his own ideology disguised as
the only proper way to approach a text (politely, of course, since he wouldn’t
want to be prescriptive). Consider the young booklover attending her first
college lit courses and being taught the importance of putting literary works
and their authors on trial for their complicity in societal evils: she comes
believing she’s going to read more broadly and learn to experience more fully what
she reads, only to be tricked into thinking what she loves most about books are
the very things that must be resisted.

Parks is probably right
in his belief that reading with a pen and looking for hidden messages makes us
more attentive to the texts and increases our engagement with them. But at what
cost? The majority of people in our society avoid literary fiction altogether
once they’re out of school precisely because it’s too difficult to get caught
up in the stories the way we all do when we’re reading commercial fiction or
watching movies. Instead of seeing their role as helping students experience
this absorption with more complex works, scholars like Parks instruct us on ways
to avoid becoming absorbed at all. While at first the suspicion of hidden
messages that underpins this oddly counterproductive approach to stories may
seem like paranoia, the alleged crimes of authors often serve to justify an
attitude toward texts that’s aggressively narcissistic—even sadistic. Here’s
how Parks describes the outcome of his instructions to his students:

There
is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a
hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a
pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere
fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We
are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a
dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a
pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more
interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own
response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy
only of being scratched.

It’s as if the author’s first crime, the original
sin, as it were, was to attempt to communicate in a medium that doesn’t allow
anyone to interject or participate. By essentially shouting writers down by
marking up their works, Parks would have us believe we’re not simply being like
the pompous idiot who annoys everyone by trying to point out all the holes in
movie plots so he can appear smarter than the screenwriters—no, we’re actually
making the world a better place. He even begins his essay on reading with a pen
with this invitation: “Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s
behavior might best improve the lot of mankind.”

Jonathan Gottschall

The
question postmodern literary scholars never get around to answering is, given
that they believe books and stories are so far-reaching in their insidious
effects, and given that they believe the main task in reading is to resist the
author’s secret agenda, why should we bother reading in the first place? Of
course, we should probably first ask if it’s even true that stories have such
profound powers of persuasion. Jonathan Gottschall, a scholar who seeks to
understand storytelling in the context of human evolution, may seem like one of
the last people you’d expect to endorse the notion that every cultural artifact
emerging out of so-called Western civilization must be contaminated with hidden
reinforcements of oppressive ideas. But in an essay that seemingly echoes Parks’
most paranoid pronouncements about literature, one that even relies on
similarly martial metaphors, Gottschall reports,

What is going on here? Why are we putty in a storyteller’s
hands? The psychologists Melanie
Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters
the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies show that the more
absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Highly
absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories—inaccuracies,
missteps—than less transported readers. Importantly, it is not just that highly
absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn’t care about them (as when
we watch a pleasurably idiotic action film). They were unable to detect the
false notes in the first place.

Gottschall’s essay is titled “Why
Storytelling Is the Ultimate Weapon,” and one of his main conclusions seems
to corroborate postmodern claims about the dangers lurking in literature. “Master
storytellers,” he writes, “want us drunk on emotion so we will lose track of
rational considerations, relax our skepticism, and yield to their agenda.”

Melanie Green

Should
we just accept Shields’ point then that stories are no more than disguised
attempts at persuasion? Should we take Parks’ advice and start scouring our
books for potentially nefarious messages? It’s important to note that
Gottschall isn’t writing about literature in his essay; rather, he’s discussing
storytelling in the context of business and marketing. And this brings up
another important point: as Gottschall writes, “story is a tool that can be
used for good or ill.” Just because there’s a hidden message doesn’t mean it’s
necessarily a bad one. Indeed, if literature really were some kind of engine driving
the perpetuation of all the most oppressive aspects of our culture, then we
would expect the most literate societies, and the most literate sectors within
each society, to be the most oppressive. Instead, some scholars, from Lynn
Hunt to Steven
Pinker, have traced liberal ideas like universal human rights to the late
eighteenth century, when novels were first being widely read. The nature of the
relationship is nearly impossible to pin down with any precision, but it’s
clear that our civilization’s thinking about human rights evolved right
alongside its growing appreciation for literature.

A
growing body of research demonstrates that people who read literary fiction
tend to be more
empathetic—and less racist even. If literature has hidden messages, they
seem to be nudging us in a direction not many would consider cause for alarm.
It is empathy after all that allows us to enter into narratives in the first
place, so it’s hardly a surprise that one of the effects of reading is a
strengthening of this virtue. And that gets at the fundamental misconception at
the heart of postmodern theories of narrative. For Shields and Parks, stories
are just clever ways to package an argument, but their theories leave
unanswered why we enjoy all those elements of narratives that so distract us
from the author’s supposed agenda. What this means is that postmodern scholars
are confused about what a story even is. They don’t understand that the whole
reason narratives have such persuasive clout is that reading them brings us
close to actual experiences, simulating what it would be like to go through the
incidents of the plots alongside the characters. And, naturally, experiences
tend to be more persuasive than arguments. When we’re absorbed in a story, we
fail to notice incongruities or false notes because in a very real sense we see
them work just fine right before our mind’s eye. Parks worries that readers
will passively absorb arguments, so he fails to realize that the whole point of
narratives is to help us become actively absorbed in their simulated
experiences.

So
what is literature? Is it pure rhetoric, pure art, or something in between? Do
novelists begin conceiving of their works when they have some philosophical
point to make and realize they need a story to cloak it in? Or are any aspects of
their stories that influence readers toward one position or another merely
incidental to the true purpose of writing fiction? Consider these questions in
the light of your own story consuming habits. Do you go to a movie to have your
favorite beliefs reinforced? Or do you go to have a moving experience? Or we
can think of it in relation to other art forms. Does the painter arrange colors
on a canvas to convince us of some point? Are we likely to vote differently
after attending a symphony? The best art really does impact the way we think
and feel, but that’s because it creates a moving experience, and—perhaps the
most important point here—that experience can seldom be reduced to a single
articulable proposition. Think about your favorite novel and try to pare it
down to a single philosophical statement, or even ten statements. Now compare
that list of statements to the actual work.

Another
fatal irony for postmodernism is that literary fiction, precisely because it
requires special effort to appreciate, is a terribly ineffective medium for
propaganda. And exploring why this is the case will start getting us into the
types of lessons professors might be offering their students if they were less
committed to their bizarre ideology than they were to celebrating literature as
an art form. If we compare literary fiction to commercial fiction, we see that
the prior has at least two disadvantages when it comes to absorbing our
attention. First, literary writers are usually committed to realism, so the
events of the plot have to seem like they may possibly occur in the real world,
and the characters have to seem like people you could actually meet. Second,
literary prose often relies on a technique known as estrangement, whereby
writers describe scenes and experiences in a way that makes readers think about
them differently than they ever have before, usually in the same way the
character guiding the narration thinks of them. The effect of these two distinguishing
qualities of literature is that you have less remarkable plots recounted in
remarkably unfamiliar language, whereas with commercial fiction you have
outrageous plots rendered in the plainest of terms.

Since
it’s already a challenge to get into literary stories, the notion that readers
need to be taught how to resist their lures is simply perverse. And the notion
that an art form that demands so much thought and empathy to be appreciated
should be treated as some kind of delivery package for oppressive ideas is just
plain silly—or rather it would be if nearly the entirety of American academia
weren’t sold on it. I wonder if Parks sits in movie theaters violently
scribbling in notebooks lest he succumb to the dangerous messages hidden in
Pixar movies (like that friends are really great!). Our lives are pervaded by
stories—why focus our paranoia on the least likely source of unacceptable
opinions? Why assume our minds are pristinely in the right before being
influenced? Of course, one of the biggest influences on our attitudes and
beliefs, surely far bigger than any single reading of a book, is our choice of
friends. Does Parks vet candidates for entrance into his social circle
according to some standard of political correctness? For that matter, does he
resist savoring his meals by jotting down notes about suspect ingredients, all
the while remaining vigilant lest one of his dining partners slip in some
indefensible opinion while he’s distracted with chewing?

Probably
the worst part of Parks’ advice to readers on how to get more out of literature
is that he could hardly find a better way to ensure that their experiences will
be blunted than by encouraging them to move as quickly as possible from the
particular to the abstract and from the emotional to the intellectual.
Emotionally charged experiences are the easiest to remember, dry abstractions
the most difficult. If you want to get more out of literature, if you want to
become actively absorbed in it, then you’ll need to forget about looking past
the words on the page in search of confirmation for some pet theory. There’s
enough ambiguity in good fiction to support just about any theory you’re
determined to apply. But do you really want to go to literature intent on
finding what you already think you know? Or would you rather go in search of
undiscovered perspectives and new experiences?

I
personally stopped reading fiction with a pen in my hand—and even stopped using
bookmarks—after reading Moonwalking
with Einstein, a book on memory and competitive mnemonics by science
writer Joshua Foer. A classic of participatory journalism, the book recounts Foer's preparation for the U.S. Memory Championships, and along the way it explores the
implications of our culture’s continued shift toward more external forms of
memory, from notes and books, to recorders and smartphones. Since one of the
major findings in the field of memory research is that you can increase your
capacity with the right kind of training, Foer began looking for opportunities
to memorize things. He writes,

I
started trying to use my memory in everyday life, even when I wasn’t practicing
for the handful of arcane events that would be featured in the championship.
Strolls around the neighborhood became an excuse to memorize license plates. I
began to pay a creepy amount of attention to name tags. I memorized my shopping
lists. I kept a calendar on paper, and also in my mind. Whenever someone gave
me a phone number, I installed it in a special memory palace. (163-4)

Foer even got rid of all the sticky notes around
his computer monitor, except for one which read, “Don’t forget to remember.”

The
most basic technique in mnemonics is what cognitive scientists call “elaborative
encoding,” which means you tag otherwise insignificant items like numbers or
common names with more salient associations, usually some kind of emotionally
provocative imagery. After reading Foer’s book, it occurred to me that while
the mnemonics masters went about turning abstractions into solid objects and
people, literary scholars are busy insisting that we treat fictional characters
as abstractions. Authors, in applying the principle of estrangement to their
descriptions, are already doing most of the work of elaborately encoding
pertinent information for us. We just to have to accept their invitations to us
and put the effort into imagining what they describe.

Linda Henkel

A
study I came across sometime after reading Foer’s book illustrates the tradeoff
between external and internal memories. Psychologist Linda
Henkel compared the memories of museum visitors who were instructed to take
pictures to those of people who simply viewed the various displays, and she found that taking
pictures had a deleterious effect on recall. What seems to be occurring here is
that museum visitors who don’t take pictures are either more motivated to get
the full experience by mentally taking in all the details or simply less
distracted by the mechanics of picture-taking. People with photos know they can
rely on them as external memories, so they’re quicker to shift their attention
to other things. In other words, because they’re storing parts of the present moment
for the future, they have less incentive to occupy the present moment—to fully
experience it—with the result that they don’t remember it as well.

If
I’m reading nonfiction, or if I’m reading a work of fiction I’ve already read
before in preparation for an essay or book discussion, I’ll still pull out a
pen once in a while. But the first time I read a work of literature I opt to
follow Foer’s dictum, “Don’t forget to remember,” instead of relying on
external markers. I make an effort to cast myself into the story, doing my best
to think of the events as though they were actually happening before my eyes and
think of the characters as though they were real people—if an author is skilled
enough and generous enough to give a character a heartbeat, who are we to drain
them of blood? Another important principle of cognitive psychology is that “Memory
is the residue of thought.” So when I’m reading I take time—usually at section
breaks—to think over what’s already happened and wonder at what may happen
next.

I do eventually get
around to thinking about abstractions like the author’s treatment of various
themes and what the broader societal implications might be of the particular
worldview represented in the story, insofar as there is a discernable one. But
I usually save those topics for the times when I don’t actually have the book
in my hands. It’s much more important to focus on the particulars, on the
individual words and lines, so you can make the most of the writer’s magic and
transform the marks on the page into images in your mind. I personally think it’s
difficult to do that when you’re busy making your own marks on the pages. And I
also believe we ought to have the courage and openheartedness to give ourselves
over to great authors—at least for a while—confident in our ability to return
from where they take us if we deem it necessary. Once in a while, the best
thing to do is just shut up and listen.